Thursday, August 7, 2014

Gail Fischer, Four Poems

Oh, we talk about allusion, but we don’t mean it. Much of the time it seems that our jabs at externality are casual (take that, externality!), sort of heartless. A snatch at, say, a movie in this mode is a snatch at nothing, a name. It’s like “jazz poets” who namedrop Coltrane / Miles / Dizzy / Satchmo / Duke / Billie / Bix etc. but never make their poems jazz.

I first grasped the sense of the range of allusive power around 1978 in a workshop with John Logan in Buffalo. Gail Fischer was in it, too, though I suspect she belonged there about as much as Willie Mays at a picnic pickup softball game. She showed us a poem one night that contained, if that’s the right word, the reference to Bertolucci’s The Conformist that you can see below in “Monticello.” I flatter myself: I think I was the only other person there who’d seen The Conformist, and something just twisted in me. Suddenly the image of Dominique Sanda’s character dying—cruelly, helplessly, needlessly, horribly—in the alpine woods leapt off the page back onto a screen in my head, and Gail’s poem assumed the energy of that image. This wasn’t an “allusion,” it was an invocation.

Good word, “invocation,” to talk about what happens when media have interspecies intercourse. There’s both the sense of “becoming vocal” (or verbal; but also the merely verbal becoming vocal) and the sense of a summoning-forth, a calling-out to the invisible. What isn’t there and can’t (reasonably) be there is made to appear, like a djinn from its improbable dimension. “The voice as summons for belief,” in Walter Ong’s words, is intermediary. Not “propositions” or “concepts,” or even “associations,” and certainly not the strangulated reduction of "interpellation" (or "hailing") spoken of by Louis Althusser, but worlds intermingle in the most powerful invocation; as such, the power of invocation is the power of dream—a tantalizing hint, I think, about where mediation resides in and around us.

I think this comes from the realization that simile can’t speak to mediation, only metaphor, or, better, image can. In fact, similitude always fails precisely at the point of intermediation, where one world is said to be “like” another. Gail’s poems like to torment language’s logic—not deny it, but make it squeal—and to “draw on” everything from spectacular parade to Renaissance painting to the local news—don’t think “Grinning a sarin smile” comes from some Encyclopedia of Terrorist Threats: it comes bubbling out of one medium into another, dragging its horrible world behind it. Again, this kind of invocation is something the other media should probably leave to poets. (JM)

Grommets

—In memory of Clifford McCarg

Therefore suddenly she said, "You see?! It's all

La Tour!" panning the hills of monuments lit

with eight-hundred-thousand pale candles

lifted to a face, the light returned to the huge reflecting pools

of evening and stars. Who couldn't Georges

de La Tour expose nocturnally and radiant?—

gamblers, fortune tellers, thieves (their dupes

in alpha states), eventually repentant Magdalenes

and saints—like Caravaggio himself, run out

of Rome for portraying The Virgin so you

could look up her nostrils—bold, then

starving on the beach for months.

As if this

despondent and millennial event was not

the drama of carnage and concealment, every

panel the gaudy, contrite, and bloated quilting

of a grave.

But before twilight the other woman, whispering,

had said, "This should be staged like The Day

of the Dead, everybody masked and wearing black

attire, our torches black, music a dirge,

a single drum," as they marched to The Mission,

Ennio Morricone's movie score, her lover

lost to all this gaiety, his names

erased, the outcast even of an underworld—

these dark crowds rippling with fire.

The 1996 National AIDS Candlelight March

fromThe Mob of the 21st Century

His mouth run out of coins, dismissed.

Storming, the unit head splits a sanguine klatch

of keyboard specialists (the sycophants and sluts)

whose whispering moans to this onrush of corporeal

Doppler effect, distorts a turbulent clot of ignoramuses

(foetid!) still fanning that administrator's

fondest praise. Hired is wired. A silent theatre

of backs of heads, hooded and tranquilized

under incandescent hoops of light pooled down

on plastic terminals, defaces the machinery

that molds and presses out and stamps

a product ghost. For seven hours they sit

and tan—stare directly into ersatz daylight—the more

lustrous the more deeply bronzed, depending

on the pecking order of how many megabytes;

or, in the polished fenders of the big hardware

acquire real neon. Passcodes are dangled, and encrypt,

and they log on (and take their hits, at:

troubleyoutroubleyoutroubleyouBACKLASH

BACKLASHCathariSPLATblazesowellNOTcalm)

to anything, and to be culled and counted no one

needs to speak, is what the deal is—this virtual

venality. Agree with anyone, to put a signature

to paycheck, with their Lascaux script.

He will also sit and worship at the altar of technology—

he'll make her scaperodent, scaperabbit, scapechick—

banks at his office opening, and lands.

Grinning a sarin smile, he glares into the cave fire

casting shadows on itself, and warms his fingers

with the alphabet (this inquisition will be C-SPANish, and

epithets will splash the network's mean dim suites, the chips

will hit the fan!) and, gazing beyond a field of icons

to blue sky and overlapping cumuli, he presses "send"—

his message soars and flies (I think, therefore I scam).

Monticello

" ... and Goethe whistling on the winding path ..."

—Osip Mandelstam

I suggest being shot here

over Tenderleaf tea. I leave

the cottage cold, cooling off,

go miles up a coiled forest road.

The trail is mounded like a burial plot

piled with florist's spoils;

I pass piles of sky-blue litter.

At once, a blonde-haired woman

walks beneath the ground

against a humus-blackened bank,

her greened face soft as a doe's,

breadlike, like an abandoned

blue car frame that opens on a valley

with its windows razored and expulsed.

Passing upward, stands of pine are

petrified in vapor, aged and aging.

I inhale with bracket fungi, healing,

pulling orange spores from moss beds.

Sucking on the symbiotic corpse plant

I tongue on its greenlessness

and speak three times aloud:

"On January 20th Lenz crossed the mountains"

inflecting, and pan in Lenz turned mad

at the fountain, shouting. Lenz.

I zero in the riddled eyes

of white tail deer, wander upward and

follow a wood thrush. Brushed

faces caught in a centrifuge fly

from my head and disperse

through the woods, woundedly.

A geyser surfaces up hot. She breaks

onto the carcass rocks, ravined inside a forest—

Dominique Sanda!—a boney spore

headed gold, green, the sky's scrape

at her feral breathing breaks,

stumbling, her blood waterhammers, she's

pursued until her spine and arms arch

bullets, crazed, disheveled, dying

in the Alps' Italian woods like an . . .

it was the chase scene from The Conformist,

a death for reasons.

I descend

from this, the wood thrush sparkling,

verbal. Viscously I scale the rock pile

where he photographed me yesterday

throwing boulders at him over the head,

hedging his camera for effect, growling

orange-eyed, and pursued. And I wanted to

kill him his

eyebrows thick, and risen up like horns.

I get back, protected from the heat,

kept cool in ozone. At the pool

he's drinking orange juice from the carton

with his mother's lover, wrecked

from tennis and alarmed

at my Medusan head

of hairline-dampened hair,

vine-snarled brow, burdocks and

dust, whatever.

He's composed against his car like power.

Staring at the ceiling outlet stamped

in patterned twos of hoof print, nostrils

rooting up the wall, pounding

inside from the sleeping porch and

onto the bed next to mine, breathing in ropes

of air, unnerved, last night I heard him,

Michael, beating

off, into his vulvate blanket violent

enough, to murder me.

Los Niños Abandonados

—after the film by Danny Lyon

What's this taste? The warm

dark affluence of hair and that

smelling like a pelt. I crane

my neck and elbow it away,

furrow my brows, licking at my mouth.

No blanket, so the sun's already bleeding

through my skin. I feel it and sleep.

Flies. Now the bells

of the cathedral, grumbling

stomachs on the street, the noise

from women's and men's voices.

We rub our eyes and swat each other

off the sidewalk, yanking at rag mats

in a little theft.

I piss a rainbow, bend its dripping

arc onto the marble tiles

between the public trees.

Whose was I? The teenaged one sings

ballads of lost love, his gestures'

arms compress the ample hips of air.

While we sit around the sewer drain

inventing games, stirring the mud,

the tunnel of a giant pipe echoes

the bridge above. Eyes drifting up,

he widens his palms as he sings,

but we strip and swim, and

scream a little in the stream.

Where could we go tonight? Before sunset

we pick tin cans to hold a bellyful,

rinse them at a back door faucet, and

walk in a restaurant. Poor men—

with women—looking like the rich to us

scrape half their plates off into

our metal dinner cans.

Whose did I used to be? Outside

my fingertips taste good.

Then, thieving there, the camera

catches us awake; it says,

"You children, come inside here—"

all running under its chrome roof,

we suddenly collapse. It coaxes,

"Come in from the rain and find hundreds

of mothers and fathers who want only

to look at you." And every time

they let you leave again, abandoned,

they'll see your spacious lives

remain unchanged.

Gail Fischer was born north of Buffalo, NY and grew up in Niagara County near Lake Ontario. She earned Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in Humanities degrees at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she studied poetry with Mac Hammond, John Logan, and Irving Feldman. She shared a special issue of Audit/Poetry with Thomas Frosch, and other work by her appeared in various little magazines. Her first full-length volume, Red Ball Jets, was published by the Outriders Poetry Project in October 2011. Ms. Fischer lives on 97 acres of reforested land dedicated to the protection of song and woodland birds and other kinds of wild life.